[Air-L] FW: Call for Papers: International Journal of McLuhan Studies

[Alex Kuskis]

International Journal of McLuhan Studies

Call for Papers
The International Journal of McLuhan Studies seeks contributions for each
monograph issue, embracing different theoretical and methodological
approaches, to review McLuhan's critical thought as represented in his
lectures and writings. The aim of the Journal is to open a dialogue between
academics, researchers, teachers, artists and business people, in order to
relate the contributions of Marshall McLuhan to contemporary questions
focused on issues of production, co-production and the consumption of media,
intelligence, education, memory, identity, desire, art, design,
collaboration and technology in the society of knowledge. 
 
Spring-Summer 2012, Issue 2
Education Overload
>From Total Surround to Pattern Recognition

Streams:
Alternative learning environment, collaborative learning, digital natives,
educational computing, educational gaming, educational media ecology,
edupunk, edutainment, e-portfolios, e-readers & iPads, figure-ground
analysis, information literacy, invisible learning, digital literacy,
learning analytics, learning biologies, learning interfaces, learning
economies, massive online open courses (MOOC), new pedagogies, social-media
driven education, tertiary orality, training of perception, web learning,
wiki culture.

Call for papers:
The United Nations General Assembly in 2002 declared the Decade of Education
for Sustainable Development: a ten-year period from 2005 to 2014 in which it
is increasingly evident that education, culture and the way children are
brought up form the keys for peaceful co-existence and a sustainable future.
Education was one of the central concerns of McLuhan's work. Marchessault
(2008) writes that McLuhan's total body of work expresses "a deeply and
consistently pedagogical project" (p. 4). The two volumes Report on Project
in Understanding New Media (1960), commissioned by the National Association
of Educational Broadcasters, and The City as Classroom: Understanding
Language and Media (1977) open a wide perspective on education, pedagogy and
media in the Electronic Era. 
Marshall McLuhan's ideas on education and learning were proposed in lectures
and writings, mainly during the 1950s, '60s and '70s. Harshly critical of
the "place-based, book-paced" educational practices of the time, McLuhan
offered a compelling vision of learning to replace lectures with active
student participation, interaction and involvement, engaging learners in
discovery learning, rather than pre-packaged teacher and textbook-delivered
content to be regurgitated on tests. His vision of "classrooms without
walls" included a transition from hardware to software, redefinition of
teacher roles, elimination of subjects, reform of assessment, and the use of
instructional media, not just books. The curriculum would focus on media
literacy and include the training of perception through figure/ground
analysis and the inclusion of arts education. Noting the trend toward
"learning a living", the constant upgrading of knowledge and skills by
professional workers, he anticipated today's emphasis on lifelong learning
and workplace training. If McLuhan's writings and lectures on media
anticipate the Internet, social media and global consciousness, his work on
education and learning anticipates today's use of instructional media,
online, collaborative and experiential learning, constructivism, as well-as
lifelong learning and other current trends in education. He noted in 1967
that: "The little red schoolhouse is already well on its way toward becoming
the little round schoolhouse", foreshadowing the arrival of the most
powerful learning platform yet devised - the Internet. Traditional
classrooms and the global village would give way to a global "classroom
without walls".  

Contemporary society is presently facing a situation of "education
overload", in which the information environment outside of schools is far
richer than that inside of schools, in which virtual environments offer a
multifaceted and complex dimension for learning practices, in which people
suffer the limits, and benefit of the possibilities of this "total surround"
of information and knowledge. In this scenario traditional pedagogies no
longer suffice for a world that calls for new visions, tools and skills for
training in perception and pattern recognition.
The International Journal of McLuhan Studies invites the submission of full
papers related to these themes (8000 words maximum, references not
included). All submitted papers will be refereed and the authors of  those
accepted will be notified, accompanied by revision suggestions where
necessary, and asked to submit a camera ready version to be published in
Issue 2 of IJMS.
Details: 
Deadline for full paper submissions: June 3rd, 2012.
First step: double blind peer review
-	Full paper submission, maximum 8000 words, references not included
-	Submission opens April 30th and close June 3rd 2012
-	Papers must be electronically submitted according to the guidelines
published on the website (www.mcluhanstudies.com)
Second Step: 
-	Papers accepted will receive detailed feedback and suggestions for
revision, where necessary, to be taken into consideration before submission
of the camera-ready version for publication in the Journal
-	Every accepted paper requires proofreading by a proof reader of the
mother tongue.

.

Some Marshall McLuhan probes and ideas on education and learning:

The business of school is no longer instruction but discovery. And the
business of the teaching establishment is to train perception upon the outer
environment instead of merely stenciling information upon the brain pans of
children inside the environment


The goal of science and the arts and of education for the next generation
must be to decipher not the genetic but the perceptual code. In a global
information environment, the old pattern of education in answer-finding is
of no avail: one is surrounded by answers, millions of them, moving and
mutating at electric speed. Survival and control will depend on the ability
to probe and to question in the proper way and place. As the information
that constitutes the environment is perpetually in flux, so the need is not
for fixed concepts but rather for the ancient skill of reading that book,
for navigating through an ever uncharted and unchartable milieu. Else we
will have no more control of this technology and environment than we have of
the wind and the tides. 


What is indicated for the new learning procedures is not the absorption of
classified and fragmented data, but pattern recognition with all that that
implies of grasping relationships (...) We seem to be approaching the age
when we shall program the environment instead of the curriculum.
There is no kind of problem that baffles one or a dozen experts that cannot
be solved at once by a million minds that are given a chance simultaneously
to tackle a problem. The satisfaction of individual prestige, which we
formerly derived from the possession of expertise, must now yield to the
much greater satisfactions of dialogue and group discovery. The task yields
to the task force.

.continue online at www.mcluhanstudies.com